


[the reason for tiring]

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: [to see you there] [14]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Barton-Romanoff European Murder Tour, F/M, Natasha has issues, Post-Winter Soldier, idiosyncratic relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 09:52:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3377171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the tub fills and fills with bubbles that have a faint but not actively unpleasant synthetic edge to their perfume, Clint drags one of the armchairs into the bathroom and settles into it with his feet up on the vanity counter; when Natalia turns off the tap and slides into the foam he says, "I don't want to be a pain, but the long story'd be nice."</p>
            </blockquote>





	[the reason for tiring]

**Author's Note:**

> I decided it was time to bring this one up to date with [(even if I could) make a deal with god](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585).

Somewhere underneath, she's angry. Somewhere just out of reach she's furious, livid, enraged. And Natalia looks at it, and leaves it out of reach, because it's not useful. There's no point. Anger only matters if you can use it, if you can do something with it; right now hers is like a child furious at a lost balloon, just blown up a thousand times and set on fire. It's anger that screams and demands that things go back to the way they were, because children don't know that the adults around them aren't actually gods and can't do anything about that. 

She can't have the old world back. It's broken. Even if some pieces of it might be repairable it'll be _repair_ and the seams will show; it will be different. 

And Natalia doesn't enjoy being angry. She knows some people do, that for some people it's even like a drug, but for her it's mostly pressure in her head and a faint sick feeling later. So she looks at it, sees it, and then metaphorically leaves it where it is: underneath, just out of reach. 

Later she might be less raw and she can snarl out loathing and betrayal while she kills practice targets or maybe even real targets, depending on how things go. But for now it can wait. 

 

They end up going to Disneyland Paris. 

Trying to deal with US border security seems like a nightmare, and there are people Clint knows scattered through Europe that predate him going to SHIELD in the first place - and still don't know that Dénis Aubon and Clint Barton are the same person, because it turns out not everyone cares enough to wade through millions of terabytes of information when they're semi-retired and an old friend just wants a passport for him and his girlfriend, ones that aren't going to start any, you know, _trouble_ what with the stupid upset that's going on right now and everything, Interpol might be going through some old files and who needs that hassle in their life? Nobody, that's who. And he's got such a nice girl right now. 

Fortunately, _Nice Girlfriend_ is something Natalia can play on autopilot, which is pretty much what she does. It's honestly hard to engage beyond that to start with. She's not sure if Clint's _fuck everything, let's go on vacation_ is more for her or for him. She's not even sure - if it's for her - that it's not a good idea. She's not sure of anything right now. 

No. 

Actually that's not true. 

There are certainties. 

But right now they're like islands at high tide in a fog and she's as likely to get thrown on one of them and bruised to shit as she is to cling to one. She's not even sure she knows what all her certainties are after everything that's happened. It might be a good time to find out. 

They couldn't have stayed where they were, anyway: both too white, too unknown, too lots of things, to stay much longer than Clint already had without being noticed. Especially not both of them. The cartels and FARC militias were exactly the kind of people who _did_ pay someone to sieve through something like the database for things that they cared about, even if it took five years. It was actually easier to disappear into Paris' young and comfortably well off _anonymes_ , for now. 

And they'd talked about that, as much as they ever talk about anything, and Natalia had agreed because nothing about it struck her as unwise, but she's not sure it's what she wants. Or that it isn't. 

She's lost track of that. What wanting feels like, how desires feel once you get beyond the animal need to find some place safe and someone to watch so you can sleep. She remembers, over a year ago now - when Clint still scared her on a weekly basis - that off and on she'd thought it would have been better if Loki'd got her, instead of him. Because she knew how to put herself back together again. Because she'd done it before. 

And she wasn't wrong, and she doesn't look back at herself thinking that with scorn, or anything like it. She _does_ know how to put herself together. 

Part of knowing that is knowing that right now she's a fucking mess and she's going to stay a fucking mess for a while. 

 

They fly once, from Larnaka to Munich, and on the plane Natalia doesn't sleep. Her CNIS reads _Nathalie Bougère_ and the boarding attendant - also, as it happened, named _Nathalie_ \- had shared a brief moment of frustration over how since the American Trouble and the Black Widow always using N-names, everyone gives them grief. During the flight, in the air, in the little trap and prison that's an aircraft en route, Natalia thinks about people and recognition and also about lying. After all, part of the joke when Clint read her the Stewart quote about WidowWatch is that she _hadn't_ put all her aliases on the internet. 

Only the SHIELD ones. 

And she'd lied to Steve about that, too. Not really on purpose. She hadn't really been thinking about that. She'd blown SHIELD covers, most of them starting with _N_ ; she'd blown the covers from before SHIELD that SHIELD knew about and wrote down. But that isn't even close to all of them. And it assumes they all have names. Covers are stories, and human stories repeat themselves over and over again: there are so many washed up ballerinas with addictions, so many bright young girls wanting to become veterinary technicians, so many angry young women who got married too soon and divorced in mutual hatred, so many _people_ with little details scattered through their lives. Change a detail, change a name, change an accent, and you have a new person. It's what you found out quickly, in this work: for every time someone got suspicious about two stories too alike and started to dig and found the hidden signs of a murderer, an embezzler, a spy, there were many, many more times that it turned out that once again, people often had the same story. (So don't panic, and don't make a break.) 

That unlike fiction, where the author has to let the audience tell each character apart, life just throws things out there and doesn't care about the plot. 

New covers aren't going to be the hard thing. The hard thing will be figuring out what the fuck they're covering. 

 

Nathalie is so easy to wear it's almost relaxing. 

Nathalie is easy because Nathalie is frankly boring. She's got brown hair and dull hazel eyes, she wears makeup that makes her disappear into a hundred other young women like her, she parts her hair on the side and hides behind it at least some of the time and thinks a slanting fringe makes her look less bland, and she wears clothes carefully picked from the ones she sees other women wear. She's a little bit shy, still kind of surprised she got a nice boyfriend this time, and her life is a long stretch in front of her, doing dull middle-management kinds of jobs until something happens and she either retires or dies. There might be kids in there, there might not. 

Nathalie likes small dogs and American romance novels and drinks bland, inoffensive wines. The biggest decision Nathalie will ever make in her life is whether to decorate the nursery with paint, or wallpaper, or both. 

She also gets shoved abruptly onto a mental shelf when the suite door closes, Clint flips the deadbolt and puts the chain on, and Natalia closes her eyes for a second before blinking them open again to take in the faux-Victorian-veneer of the Tinkerbell Suite. She says, flatly, "I need a bath." 

And she does. Baths - sitting, soaking, lazing in a tub of hot water - are . . . a people thing. They're a touchstone. Now that the door's locked on the outside world and Clint's secured the room, she needs one. 

As the tub fills and fills with bubbles that have a faint but not actively unpleasant synthetic edge to their perfume, Clint drags one of the armchairs into the bathroom and settles into it with his feet up on the vanity counter; when Natalia turns off the tap and slides into the foam he says, "I don't want to be a pain, but the long story'd be nice." 

Natalia sighs and sinks into the water, leaning her skull against the porcelain edge. That's . . . fair. She hasn't said anything more about it. Any of it. And while some of it played out on international news, that's not enough. She's made a couple of stabs at trying to think how to start it, how to make the story work; she closes her eyes, pinches the bridge of her nose, takes another stab and fails just like the other times. 

A few months ago she'd've been able to tell this story, this _kind_ of story, with all its weight and its . . . it's _whatever_. Now she can't even quite grasp at naming what it is that makes it hard to tell, and she gives up, and lets it be shallow and graceless. 

"You know how Rogers set up the suicide op that had him crashing in the Arctic because his best friend got shot off a train?" she asks. And when Clint makes a little noise of confirmation, she goes on, "You know the Winter Soldier?" 

And she's thankful, or something like it, that with Clint she doesn't have to expand on that one, doesn't have to go over the story behind her least favourite scar, the one she has - had - to work into every fucking cover where she might even think of taking her shirt off, because it'd taken a fucking ton of treatments to get it down to just as bad as it is now. It was a horrific fucking day, a horrific fucking injury, and she hates the scar. 

She doesn't have to draw him the full picture, either: after less than ten seconds he says, "You're fucking kidding me," in the flat voice that means he knows she isn't. She opens her eyes and rolls her head from side to side just a bit in quick denial anyway. "Jesus H fucking Christ," Clint says, in the same flat voice. He pulls his hand down his face. 

He's quiet long enough that Natalia gets distracted by how the bubbles move on the water, how different layers of the bath have subtly different temperatures, the difference between water on skin, air on wet skin, air on dry skin. She's sunk deep enough into all of it that when Clint blows out a breath and asks, "So how'd he take that?" she has to look at him and blink once or twice before she remembers narrative and which one she was telling. 

Then she lets her mouth quirk up at the corner and she rubs at her temple with one thumb, creating a circle of wet skin for the air to touch. "As soon as the Insight carriers were a confirmed kill," she says, "he dropped comms, dropped his shield and decided to let the Winter Soldier beat him to death if he really wanted." She glances at Clint's expression and adds, "Yes, I'm serious. And being literal." 

Clint says, "Jesus fuck." Which more or less covers it. 

Natalia pulls her hair over one shoulder while Clint assimilates that. She forgot to tie it back before she got in and the straggling wet ends are annoying her. 

Maybe she'll cut it all off again. 

She's braiding it over that shoulder when Clint exhales loudly again and says, "Now that is some Homeric epic level shit. Don't ever do that," he adds, and he's pretending he isn't serious. "I mean not like it's part of my life plan, but if it ever does come down to that kind of b-s, just shoot me." Then he leans his head on his fist and says, "Obviously the guy didn't decide to take Rogers' offer, though. Last the news was saying he's in hospital." 

Natalia shakes her head, not bothering to respond on the completely redundant warning-slash-request. "No, he didn't," she confirms. "Point of fact given where they found Rogers and the shape he was in, the guy dragged him out of the wreckage and left him on the bank. Literally the only way he could have survived." 

"I'm taking for granted he disappeared," Clint says. He's digging at his cuticles with one nail, a bad habit and Natalia should stop him. Actually, she's going to stop him. She flicks water out of the bath at him, so that he grimaces, flexes his fingers and stops. 

"Oh yes," Natalia confirms. "Completely. And from what Maria and I picked through in the wreckage where HYDRA was keeping him, nobody's going to find him until he wants to be found." 

And part of her hopes he _doesn't_. At least not for a while. Natalia had seen people torn limb from limb before, but not without knowing it took machinery or animals to do it. Human skin and bone is tougher than most people think; knowing something nominally human could do what'd been done in that vault disturbs her. Not - once they'd cleared away enough of the blood to look around - that she blames him. 

But wherever he is, there's enough rage to paint the streets with blood; she hopes he stays away from other humans for a while. 

"Rogers is looking anyway," Clint says, and it's not a question. Natalia sighs, stretches out her legs and points and flexes one foot after the other, trying to work out the last of the plane and the trains after that. 

"He and Wilson are out there as we speak," she tells him. "Hopefully Sam can keep him from wrecking himself completely, but I'm honestly not holding my breath." 

"Your pessimism terrifies me," Clint says, matter of fact, and then, "Wilson?" and Natalia has to laugh, at least a little. 

"Wilson," she says, sitting up in the tub to stretch the airplane out of her shoulders this time, "is living proof Steve Rogers has some kind of fucking fairy godmother or something. _Day of_ the _Star_ op, actual _day of_ , he decides to actually give himself an excuse to strike up a conversation with the guy. Make friends. I was very proud of him, actually," she remarks, off-hand, distracted by the familiar sense of the world shaking so much in such a short time that days-ago seems like years-past. 

"He actually made a friend who wasn't SHIELD?" Clint says. "Good for him. So that only took, what, two years?" 

"I told you I was playing obnoxious matchmaker for a reason," Natalia replies. Feels herself smile briefly before that fades. Shrugs. "Nick got attacked by HYDRA posing as police later that day, two days later Wilson's giving us shelter and committing treason with us and yes," she adds, meeting Clint's eyes, "this is _me_ saying Wilson's actually that guy." 

Clint acknowledges that with a nod, but says, "I thought the Winter Soldier shot Fury," frowning - and this time Natalia knows her smile has absolutely no humour at all. 

"Only after the other assassins failed. First he blew Nick up," she says, settling back against the tub, "then when Nick cut himself down into the sewers tracked him to Steve's place and shot him there. I think the hit was supposed to be the fake police alone, but Pierce was smart enough to know that once he made an open attempt, he couldn't afford to have Fury live." 

Clint nods slowly. "So he had his nuclear option," he fills in, thoughtfully. "Which turns out he needed. Fury apparently dies, everything's great - "

"Except it turns out Steve Rogers isn't a good doggie," Natalia says. 

And it can be like this, in these moments, like she's watching herself from outside and the sing-song mockery of that isn't something _she_ decides to do. Or at least isn't something the part of her that's watching decides to do. Other places, it's fucking dangerous. Here, not so much. 

"Fury left him the data I took off the _Star_ ," she says, letting herself detach from the words a little bit. "When Pierce started digging at him, Steve refused to admit Fury told him anything about there being a problem in SHIELD, definitely refused to admit the data existed, and then when Pierce tried to have STRIKE and some other thugs take him in the elevator he beat the shit out of them and jumped out of the elevator thirty stories up." 

Clint shakes his head. "Do they _read_ their own files?" he asks, rhetorically. It's a fair point: it's not like you can't draw an accurate picture of Steve Rogers from the old SSR reports, if you look at them properly. 

"Mmm," Natalia agrees. "Then he killed a quinjet with a motorcycle and his shield. Still would have been in huge fucking trouble, given he left the drive in the hospital vending machine, but I pulled it and waited for him. We tried to get it decrypted, but it had an active AI rewriting the encryption while I worked on it; traced it to Camp Lehaye, found the first SHIELD HQ in one of the buildings, then found Arnim Zola uploaded to a thousand old analog computer banks." 

Clint pulls his feet down from the vanity and leans forward. "Zola as in the little Nazi-HYDRA troll that made - " 

" - the original Tesseract weapons, yeah," Natalia finishes, mouth turning up again. "And we brought him over for Paperclip, back in the day. Apparently when he got cancer he uploaded himself, or at least a version of himself, to computers. In the Seventies."

"You know at some point our lives have got to get as weird as they fucking can, and stop," Clint mutters. Natalia feels herself finish the smile. 

"Pierce tried to kill us with a surface-to-surface missile," she goes on, in spite of Clint's scowl that says more words are just underneath the surface, because as fond as she is, she doesn't need to hear another round of Clint Barton's disgust for the kind of Cold War fear that made Paperclip seem like a good idea. "Turns out vibranium's good for all the way up to that, though. I got knocked cold but that was all, Steve hauled me out, we ended up at Wilson's. Stole the Falcon wings from Fort Meade, scared the truth out of Sitwell, planned on stopping the Insight launch and going from there and then . . . " she opens her hand and then flattens a mound of bubbles. 

"What happened to Sitwell?" Clint asks, and adds as he gets up, "I'm making friends with the mini-bar, want something?" 

"Something that isn't awful vodka," Natalia says, and, "The Winter Soldier hauled Sitwell out of the backseat of Wilson's car on the causeway at eighty miles per hour and threw him in front of a semi going the other way." 

"Well," says Clint after a long pause, coming back with a glass of something amber that he hands to Natalia and a glass of something clear he keeps for himself, "couldn't've happened to a nicer guy." 

Clint, Natalia knows, never liked Sitwell. It's not actually easy to get on Clint Barton's shitlist, mostly because it's not easy to make him care enough to bother, but Jasper Sitwell did _something_ back in Barton's first days at SHIELD that landed him there, solid and square. She keeps meaning to ask what, but it always comes up when something else matters more and she can't be bothered. Like now. 

"Causeway was a fucking nightmare," she admits sipping at the drink and finding it's Jack. Clint nods to the healing stitches on her shoulder, which she barely notices by now. 

"I figured," he says, simply. 

"I have honestly never been so sure I was going to die," she tells him, meeting his eyes and resting her glass against her cheek. "And if it hadn't been for Steve recognizing him and that throwing him, and then Wilson saving our asses . . . " 

Clint blinks at her. "You're telling me Rogers - " 

"Mask came off," Natalia says, staring through the bubbles and into the memories, "Steve said his name, something cracked right there, right then. Just a crack," she says, "threw him, made him hesitate, then the first responders caught up with us, he ghosted and STRIKE had to play LEO long enough to get us off camera." She sighs, and adds, in Russian, "Watching Steven Rogers give in without a fight is one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen." 

Clint's frowning. "Hill was under gear with STRIKE?" he hazards after a minute. 

Natalia takes another sip of her whiskey and nods. "And Fury was alive, and there were targeting chips we could replace, and Achilles decided that for Patroclus, every Trojan should burn." 

Clint barks a laugh. "Y'know, I wasn't actually going to go there," he says, and Natalia snorts. 

"You already invoked Homer, you were thinking it. Steve was right," she goes on, "SHIELD was too compromised to salvage and the drop hamstrung any attempt HYDRA might make to go on, but I was sitting in that room with them, Clint, and Nick was in denial and Steve just wanted everything to burn. If Hill hadn't made the right call it might've got ugly." 

She rests her glass against her collarbone this time. Then she sighs. "So there's the long story. I dragged what I could for Steve out of Kiev before I left and he's looking. Fury's somewhere east of here digging around in the wreckage for anything important that got missed. Maria went to Stark; Pepper'll take care of her. Everyone else who survived's scattered to the other agencies or gone private, and then there's us. And I don't know what Steve can do," she adds, before Clint asks. "Maybe he'll spend the rest of his life hunting, maybe he'll get killed, maybe he'll get a miracle. I have no idea." 

Clint taps his finger on his glass and says, "And that's bugging the shit out of you. In case you hadn't noticed." 

Natalia swirls her glass and frowns. In the end she nods slowly, because he's right and it's useful to know. "Don't think there's anything I can do about it, though," she says, trying to think clinically and then looking at him, to watch him shake his head. 

"No," he says. "Not really. Not yet." He frowns again and says, "Where the fuck was Stark in all of this? I mean, okay, he never liked Fury anyway so maybe he gives two shits about him getting apparently killed, but the causeway fight was kind of a big deal and it's not like he refrains from sticking his nose in other people's business." 

Natalia swallows a bit more alcohol before she answers. "ICU. Malaria, atypical presentation. No, I'm not shitting you," she adds, at his expression. "He and Potts were in south-east Asia making business friends and Stark being Stark when he started getting fever spikes he just ignored them until he collapsed. Fortunately he collapsed before actual massive organ failure." 

"Y'know I can never tell if I hope there is a supreme being or not," Clint says, with the general tone that says he's done, he's going to leave be after his last word, "because on the one hand if there is, it's a complete asshole but on the other hand if there is, I might get to punch it in the face some day." He sighs, downs the last of his drink and adds, "You eating?" 

Natalia wants to make a face, but refrains and just makes an irritable _nnnh_ noise instead. But she says, "Order me something made of plants." 

"Cooked plants or raw plants?" 

Natalia shakes her head. "I don't care." 

 

It's six hours later, and she feels better for having eaten. 

The television's on and muted and Clint's asleep on his back. Natalia's awake, curled on her side with her head on her arm. She's sort of watching him sleep and sort of not, sort of staring into nowhere because it's the third night without sleep-aids, because she has to learn how to sleep like a human being again. 

There are certainties in her head like rocks for a boat to smash itself apart on: SHIELD is dead; Fury didn't trust her; she has no given purpose anymore; somewhere in her head she's angry as hell; Clint will follow her anywhere she wants to go except rogue, at which point he'll shoot her; the world's been turned upside down. 

And then beyond all of that: she'll be okay. She aches and she'll keep aching, but she'll be okay. 

She leaves the flickering light of the television screen on, cycling through old movies and informercials, because it reminds her that she's in the real world, the one with people and mass media and complicated history, and somewhere around three in the morning she falls asleep.


End file.
